Archive for August, 2012

Welcome to the biggest mystery of the Celtics offseason: Jeff Green‘s contract situation. Does he have a deal? Is it really for that much? Has he signed it yet? What’s the holdup? Is he healthy? All fair questions. All unanswered.

No big deal. Jason Terry just making the rounds, guaranteeing a Celtics championship this season to anybody who’ll listen. Of course, we heard the same rhetoric from Mickael Pietrus last year.

By now, you’ve probably seen Terry’s new tattoo on his left biceps of the C’s logo. “There’s the lucky leprechaun,’ he told WBZ-TV’s Steve Burton during an interview Thursday at Canton’s Reebok Headquarters that will air Sunday night on Sports Final, “and he’s spinning the Larry O’Brien trophy, which we will win this year.”

‘Looking at our roster and what Danny [Ainge] has put together, we have a good team,” he said. “A solid core of veteran guys, two Hall of Famers, one of the best point guards in the league — the best if you ask me in Rajon Rondo — and a good nucleus of young guys that are going to have to play and help us out.’

Want more of Terry’s brash takes on his forthcoming first season in a Celtics uniform?

Over the past week, the digital notebook filled up with interviews of CelticsAvery Bradley, Dionte Christmas, Kris Joseph and Courtney Lee in addition to a conversation with Syracuse assistant coach Adrian Autry.

Most of those discussions can be found in Green Street blog posts on Lee, Bradley and Joseph, but plenty of compelling quotes ended up on the cutting room floor. Here are those deleted scenes.

ADRIAN AUTRY, Syracuse assistant coach

On Fab Melo: “I think Fab is with the right team. With the personnel they have, the professionalism they have and Doc Rivers, you’re going to see him to continue to get better. He wants to be very, very good. He wants to be a great player. You’ll continue to see him get better, just like he made leaps and bounds with us from his first year to his second. He works hard in the gym. He gives 110 percent. He’ll be fine.”

On Joseph’s character: “It being my first year coming in, he made my job a lot easier. He was the leader of our group, he was talented, and he caught on to everything very quickly. We hit it off right away. He was the first person I reached out to when I got the job. … I always knew about his talent, and I was excited to work with all the tools that he had to offer, but when I got to spend some time with him and talk about his background, it took me to another level.”

On Syracuse’s zone: “A lot of elements of our zone are man-to-man. In practice, we do man-to-man segments because teams play us man-to-man. Our guys have an idea.”

Celtics co-owner and CEO Wyc Grousbeckappeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” He talked business — which we’ll get to in a moment — but once the host ceased his endless string of incorrect basketball facts (He thought this happened: “And now there’s a steal by DJ, underneath to Bird, he lays it in.”), Bostonian Ben Mezrich, author of both “Bringing Down the House” and “The Accidental Billionaires,” snuck in a couple basketball questions.

Grousbeck: “The funny thing about KG is that there’s really no story, because there’s a 24/7 continuous loop. You couldn’t even break it up into stories. You’ll be on the team plane at three or four in the morning, you’ll hear this noise nonstop — it’s someone talking at the top of his voice — and it’s KG. From the moment you take off to the moment you land, whatever hour of the day, he’s talking to rookies, he’s telling stories. He’s just nonstop. there’s some sort of nuclear reactor inside him that never quits.”

Grousbeck: “We’re lucky to have Danny Ainge here. Ryan McDonough was an early scout who saw Rondo. Danny and Ryan saw him at Oak Hill Academy in high school. Basically, Danny said at that point he was going to be the starting point guard of the Celtics three or four years later, and that’s what happened. Danny had his eye on him very, very early. That’s a competitive advantage we have — having Danny Ainge as president of basketball.”

Grousbeck touched on a number of other topics, including the Olympics, team ownership as investment and the NBA lockout. Here’s a rundown of the highlights from the 10-minutes discussion.

This is Part Two of a two-part series on Kris Joseph. If you missed Part One on Sunday, click here.

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

It’s one thing to have the skill set and a 6-foot-7, 215-pound frame. It’s another to produce on the court.

‘Our first game when he was a junior, we were playing DeMatha (Hyattsville, Md.),” said Perrow. “They were ranked top five in the country if not top two or three, and we were unranked. We were decent. DeMatha started out the game with a tremendous flow of points on a combination of dunks and other things. Kris was un-rattled.

“He led us to seven or eight straight points and calmed the team down. We knew then we had something special. That’s the way he’s always been. If you ever see him screaming or yelling, you know something’s good, because he’s never all that emotional. He plays with a poker face. He was the calm on our team.’

Same goes for Syracuse. Joseph averaged a team-high 13.4 points to go along with 4.7 rebounds, 1.5 assists and 1.4 steals for a balanced Orange squad that resided atop the Division I rankings for much of his senior year before, coincidentally, Celtics first-round picks Fab Melo (academic suspension) and Jared Sullinger (19 points, 7 rebounds) effectively ended his season in a 77-70 loss to Ohio State in the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight (“We don’t bring it up,” said Joseph of Sullinger. “We did once, but we haven’t brought it up again.”). There’s a reason the Orange were 10.5 points better with Joseph on the floor this past season than with him on the bench.

“He had a stretch toward the middle part of the season, when we needed something big, he got it done,” said Autry. “It was efficient. That’s always the thing that impressed me about him. He never took a lot of shots. He was always efficient. Against West Virginia, there was a stretch we got him in a post-up, and he made a step-through move, then came down and nailed a 3, and then grabbed a tough rebound.

“There’s certain things he does that, in my mind, I’d say, ‘He’s a pro.'” And soon enough, he was.

For your viewing pleasure, Celtics guard Jason Terryshared photos of his newest tattoo: The C’s leprechaun logo balancing the Larry O’Brien championship trophy. The tattoo appears on his left biceps opposite another one of the trophy, which he got the summer before the Mavericks’ 2010-11 run to the NBA title. Coincidence?